Ginkgo shows up all over China, Phillips said, though it’s not a common ingredient. The seeds are valued for their putative medicinal properties, which is an underlying theme in Chinese culinary theory. The cooks think about the health qualities traditional Chinese medicine ascribes to each ingredient.
Huang joined us for lunch, and the pair told stories from Taiwan and from the hidden subcultures of Oakland’s and San Francisco’s Chinatowns. I gorged on the ginkgo dishes, along with soba noodles and smoked chicken. Partway through the meal I realized I’d easily eaten at least ten seeds, and asked if they thought I was in any danger. Phillips blinked. “I have never heard that they could cause poisoning,” she said. I wasn’t too concerned, because I had asked another cook, a woman born in China, about toxicity and she laughed. “Americans always say it’s poison,” she said. “No. This is American superstition.” On my own, I’d been hypervigilant, but there, eating good food with thousands of years of tradition behind it, I felt no concern.
ARBOREAL CHARISMA
What is it that makes ginkgos compelling? Peter Crane wrote: “Ginkgo owes its resurgence in historical times not just to its utilitarian value but also to some kind of irresistible biological charisma that has taken hold in both Eastern and Western cultures.” But what is this “irresistible biological charisma”? Ginkgo is not one of those superlative organisms, like the giant sequoia, or the blue whale, that is breathtaking because it’s shockingly out of scale with everything else we encounter. It doesn’t have brilliant colors or exhibit particularly startling behavior, although ginkgo sex is strangely wonderful. And yet people do form special relationships with these trees.
It must have something to do with their uniqueness. Ginkgos are different from the other species in this book in that they are strange enough that they sometimes draw attention to themselves. And once your eyes are tuned to see ginkgos, they pop out at you. After noticing those smelly trees, I began to see others: My nearest BART station is decorated with ginkgos, and there are several leggy youngsters within a block of my house. The writer Nancy Ross Hugo says that immature ginkgos are like “adolescent boys who don’t know where to put their fast-growing arms and legs.” It’s true: During the period when the trunk is about the circumference of an arm, ginkgos are in a hurry to grow all at once. “The widely spaced branches create a scaffolding that looks more like a coatrack than a tree,” Hugo wrote. But then, perhaps around the age of thirty or so, when the trunk’s circumference is closer to that of a thigh, leaves fill in this scaffold. While other trees turn many colors in the autumn, ginkgo leaves morph from green to gold. They begin to turn in late summer, and by about mid-November—depending on the latitude and the whims of the particular tree—they have transformed entirely. The trees are brilliantly uniform, each one a thick daub of yellow against the sky.
Perhaps it’s this autumn beauty that inclines people toward ginkgos. When they grow older still, they become giants of great gravitas. In comparison to those massive craggy branches, the leaves are dots. You can see through their pointillist drapery to the interior architecture. They live for many hundreds of years. Careful reviews of historical records puts the oldest trees at about a thousand years, though some claim they are as much as four thousand years old. These big ginkgos—there are more than one hundred of them—are especially magnificent in the autumn.
Then the leaves fall: One day the golden leaves are aloft, and the next they are spread in a circle around the trunk. The fall is so dramatic that for many years the townspeople of Monroe, Wisconsin, held a competition to see who could most accurately guess the date the old tree outside the library would shed its leaves. “Ginkgo has the most synchronized leaf drop of any tree I know,” Crane writes. I waited eagerly to note the day of my local leaf drop, but in the mild climate of coastal California it didn’t happen quite as suddenly as the experts had described. Perhaps some ginkgos lost leaves faster than other trees, but not dramatically so. Who could blame them? The seasons here pass quietly, like a pulse beneath the skin.
None of the ginkgo’s aesthetic qualities are all that different from those of other trees. I could just as easily wax poetic about the beauty of beech trees, or the majesty of ancient sugar pines. But I think that ginkgos are just unusual enough for the occasional human to take notice of them. It’s not that any particular tree or breed of dog or varietal of rose is objectively superior to its peers, they just happen to be the creatures that momentarily capture our flickering attention. As soon as humans take openhearted notice of anything in the natural world, we find reason to love it.
I came across one of those gawky juvenile trees on a sunny September afternoon. It was planted next to the same driveway where Josephine and I had pilfered acorns. It was small, shorter than I, and its leaves were turning yellow at their edges.
“Are you looking at that ginkgo tree?” someone called.
I looked for the speaker. Two women, one with white hair and one gray, were standing at the top of a slate-tiled stoop. They came down the steps.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” said the white-haired woman. “It wants to grow every which way but up, though.” She pointed to the top of the tree, which had broken off and was a lifeless stick. It had vigorous branches sprouting laterally.
I asked if she knew its sex.
“Well, it’s funny you should ask. A friend of mine said, ‘No matter what, don’t get a male, because they smell awful.’ But then I learned it’s the females that smell, we had it backwards.”
Nonetheless, this tree had never borne fruit, she said, so perhaps it was male after all. I explained that she wouldn’t know for a long time, because ginkgos take twenty or thirty years to become sexually mature.
“Ah well,” she smiled. “By then I would be a very old lady.” As we parted, she told me to let her know if I learned anything about how to guide her ginkgo’s growth upward rather than outward.
A few days later, I left a note for my neighbor on her stoop. I’d learned that ginkgos have two types of branches: fast-growing long shoots, and slow-and-steady short shoots, which produce leaves. Young ginkgos are almost entirely long shoots, which is why juveniles often look so leggy. If the uppermost long shoot dies, the nearest short shoots will transform to take over the job. This is true for all trees: When one loses the uppermost leader, a chemical signal will cue other branches to grow upward. Because ginkgos grow quickly and can sprout branches from any leaf shoot, they can be especially unruly. A gardener can restrain these upstarts by simply pruning off their tips, or by tying them to train the branches upward. An espaliered ginkgo covers a wall of the University of Cambridge plant sciences building like ivy: it is living proof they can be trained. But this is unusual and evidently takes a lot of work.
Tree Watching
Paying attention to the minutiae of how a tree grows sounds like the most boring possible occupation. Watch paint dry, and at least it’s over in a few hours. Trees can grow for centuries. But Nancy Ross Hugo and Robert Llewellyn, the creators of the remarkable book Seeing Trees, found that they actually couldn’t keep up with the trees in their backyards. If you look at the big picture—the tree as it’s growing—nothing happens. If, however, you notice the details—the leaves emerging, the flowers forming, the fruits bursting from the flowers—then trees seethe with action.
To capture this combination of large and small, Llewellyn used software to merge multiple photographs. The resulting images allow you to see these tree parts more clearly than you can in real life. Both the large and the small perspectives remain in focus, producing startling images. What looks like a radiant deep-sea creature turns out to be the vermillion pollen-releasing structure of a common red maple.
Trees will reward the observant. Watch closely in springtime and you can see how buds push outward from the wood and unfold their leaves. You can find the pollen distributors and pollen-receiving flowers. You can watch the seeds grow and transform, and finally watch the leaves fall. Hugo says that if you are willin
g to notice trees, you’re likely to start thinking of fall as “a verb, not a noun. The action of leaves in air.” The same is surely true of spring: It’s not just a section of the calendar to be traversed, it’s the springing forth of delicate, fleshy leaves from inanimate wood.
You don’t have to climb to see this stuff. When a tree is too tall to see up into its branches, Hugo recommends looking down to see what has fallen. She tries not to call this material “litter.” “I consider it detritus laden with treasures, like shells on a seashore.”
A lot of these tree treasures are bizarre. Once you see one, you may wonder how you ever missed it. But you have to truly see it: Let it in, allow it to provoke your curiosity. We have a pair of magnolias in front of our house, and one day Josephine picked up a sort of cone from under these trees and asked me what it was. I said I didn’t know. I’d seen these things so often that I could ignore them without ever wondering what they were up to.
But when I looked at a magnolia cone closely, I couldn’t help but wonder. It looks like a Dr. Seuss character, with a fuzzy oblong head covered with stiff brown curls and a depilated neck. This cone, or follicetum, develops at the center of those big magnolia flowers. If it stays on the tree, it will grow much larger and produce red seeds. But sometimes, a squirrel or a crow dislodges a cone—or perhaps the tree aborts it—while it’s still in this half-developed state.
When you decide to learn about one species, you inevitably learn about others, and I’d been seeing references to magnolias in ginkgo books. Magnolias are not an evolutionary loner like ginkgos—most of its family survived—but it has been around almost as long. Both kinds of trees grew a hundred million years ago, and both likely fed dinosaurs.
Tree of Time
Does it matter if something is a living fossil? The ginkgo is no more special than a relatively recent arrival like an oak, but it can open the doors of human perception a crack and provide a glimpse of eternity.
When the physician and writer Oliver Sacks was a boy, he had a book called Ancient Plants by the paleobotanist Marie Stopes. In Sack’s Island of the Colorblind, he wrote that Stopes’ book
excited me strangely. . . . I got my first glimpse of deep time, of the millions of years, the hundreds of millions, which separated the most ancient plants and our own. “The human mind,” Stopes wrote, “cannot comprehend the significance of vast numbers, of immense space, or of aeons of time”; but her book, illustrating the enormous range of plants which had once lived on the earth—the vast majority long extinct—gave me my first intimation of such eons. I would gaze at the book for hours, skipping over the flowering plants and going straight to the earliest ones—ginkgos, cycads, ferns, lycopods, horsetails.
There is something eerie and wonderful in these plants that have traversed the vastness of time, that have made their way from an alien world of the past into our own world. When Johannes Kepler confirmed the Copernican theory that Earth was not at the center of the universe, he confessed to feeling a “hidden and secret horror” at being lost in some obscure quadrant of the vastness. There’s an old ginkgo on the UC Berkeley campus that I visit sometimes, and when I lay my hands on its rough bark and try to imagine its journey across time and space, I can’t quite replicate Kepler’s horror, but sometimes, I do feel a twinge of vertigo to be standing so close to the edge of deep time. The probability—the number of coin flips for survival versus extinction—that led to me and this tree breathing the same air is mind-bogglingly low. It gives me an odd sense of camaraderie with the tree. It’s a raw, unsophisticated feeling, just: Will you look at us, alive! Together!
Sacks wrote lovingly about ginkgos, but he expressed this sense of camaraderie most clearly when writing about another living fossil, the cycad. Years after Sacks obsessed over Ancient Plants, he visited the cycads of Guam. He was surprised to find that a giant pollen cone of a cycad was warm to the touch; they generate heat, perhaps to spread insect-beckoning scents. Sacks, overcome by the “almost-animal warmth,” impulsively hugged it “and almost vanished in a huge cloud of pollen.”
I started this chapter by asking why people are inspired to plant Ginkgo biloba, but I suppose I was really asking, “What makes this tree special?” I’ve just filled pages with legitimate answers to that question. But at the same time, there’s nothing special about ginkgo. Every tree could provide just as many wonders if we dedicated the same amount of time to its study and appreciation.
As I learned about ginkgos, I also picked up facts about the other trees in my neighborhood. I learned that the often-hated tree of heaven has bark that smells of peanut butter when scratched. The magnolias in front of my house, of course, became fascinating when I thought of them as triceratops fodder. I noticed the horse chestnuts lining a nearby street when I saw the squirrels harvesting their nuts, and I learned that these nuts, or “conkers,” aren’t good for eating, but children around the world attach them to strings and see whose can last longest when they bash them against each other. Oh, and there was the pinecone I dissected with Josephine, which revealed a single seed. When she asked why it was attached to its gauzy wing, I threw it up into the air so she could see it helicopter down, but then watched as an eddy in the wind caught the propeller and whirled it up into the sky and out of sight. I learned that almost all city trees are floodplain species, with roots that can survive submerged, by water or concrete.
We plant trees, and then forget to notice them. They are ornaments, and they are also infrastructure, cleaning the air, absorbing storm water, and cooling the sidewalks. They can also provide food. I, for one, am happy to have a couple female ginkgos nearby. Perhaps I’ll begin gathering the seeds as an autumn tradition. But if nothing else, the stench forced me to pay attention, as I had as a child, to the meaning hidden in trees.
TURKEY VULTURE
Josephine, breathless and wild-eyed, found me in the kitchen. “Papa! There’s an eagle!”
“Do you mean a seagull?”
“No, an e-gull!” She pointed outside.
I wiped my hands and followed her to the door. We got there just in time to see a black bird taking off from a tree, powering into the air on wings that might have been longer than my arms. Maybe it was an eagle—a golden eagle, perhaps? Then I saw the scrawny red head. It was a turkey vulture.
I’m generally disappointed when I see turkey vultures. Whenever I see something vaguely raptorlike gliding across the sky, I’ll stop to see if I can identify a hawk or falcon—respectable birds worthy of note. But then I’ll see the fingerlike feathers spread wide at the wingtips or the white on the underside of the wings and think, Oh, just a turkey vulture.
But after a year of researching wildlife so ubiquitous they are invisible, I couldn’t turn away, or tell Josephine that her enthusiasm was misplaced. So what do we know about turkey vultures?
The answer: Not much. Turkey vultures have deflected the attention of scientists just as effectively as they had deflected mine. They are the introverts of the avian world, silently doing important work while more entertaining birds get all the love. This only made them more interesting to me: The more invisible a creature is, the greater its potential to enrich my life. Douglas Long, a biologist and longtime turkey vulture enthusiast, is going to write the first book on these birds as soon as he can get to it. When I asked around, several people told me that Long was the person to talk to about turkey vultures, and I began pestering him with e-mails. Eventually, we got in touch. He told me there are huge gaps in our understanding of turkey vultures. And that’s odd, because they are so big, so readily visible in the sky.
“I think turkey vultures are probably the biggest least-studied birds in North America,” Long told me. “What we know about golden eagles or bald eagles could fill books. No one has written a book on turkey vultures. Not that much is known about them.”
“We have no real idea of what the current population is and what it was historically,” he told me. We don’t know how long they live, though there’s a forty-yea
r-old bird in captivity. “It’s not like you cut off the wing and count the rings.” Though we see the birds all around North and South America, scientists don’t have a handle on their distribution or movements. These very basic facts about this very common bird are simply unknown. Turkey vultures are like an unassuming neighbor that you frequently see, but if you start asking around, you realize no one has ever talked to the guy. And all of a sudden, what had seemed too banal to notice becomes mysterious.
I mistake turkey vultures for hawks or falcons because all these birds are gliding strategists. All raptors are excellent gliders, but turkey vultures have mastered the art. They set their wings open and make only the subtlest muscular adjustments to maneuver. In this way they are able to hang on the breeze, expending minimal energy. They circle, buoyant in thin air, searching for food. An adult turkey vulture may take to the air in the morning and, after some gawky flapping to hoist itself skyward, spend the next twelve hours aloft, motionless as it traverses vast expanses. Turkey vultures spend 90 percent of the daylight hours soaring, Long said. They ride rising bubbles of warm air called thermals up to 5,000 feet, then spiral slowly down. They can go higher—up to 20,000 feet. We only know they reach that altitude because they have hit airplanes far above where pilots expect to see birds.
A HYGIENE PROBLEM
Long had agreed to meet me at a brewery. He told me to look for “the chubby middle-aged guy in a Hawaiian shirt.” I wouldn’t call him chubby: He has a Falstaffian solidity, and the jovial bonhomie to match. Long’s interest in wildlife biology stems from a childhood filled with animals, he told me. As a baby, he slept alongside cats in his crib, and there were many more creatures in the backyard of his Orange County, California, home. “In the place where neighbors would have swimming pool or a tennis court, we had a walk-through aviary filled with birds and a koi pond.”
Unseen City Page 11